Licorice Recoil

New game! I put out a geocities-core MIDI-backed web fic a couple weeks ago. It's a style I've wanted to work in for a long time -- probably since reading RPGClassics sprite-edit OC chats as a kid. Give it a read right here for free, in your browser or on your phone.

Like A Cold Place, this one started off as shitposting on social media. I kept seeing cute gay art of the two leads from the anime Lycoris Recoil on my twitter timeline, so I wrote a little thread about them. My feeds often get bombarded with gorgeous character art for shows and games I know nothing about. The joke is that I wind up developing relationships with these characters in that weird online context vacuum, and that those relationships can be fun in their own right.

I liked the bones of the story I laid out in that thread. I thought about expanding it into a little VN, then gave up on the idea because it sounded like too much work. Two weeks later I was in the shower, thinking again about wanting to make a geocities-ass web story, then jolted as I realized the two ideas could work together. A lot of my projects start like that -- a little story I want to tell, and separately a medium I want to work in. Then, finally, snapping them together.

It actually wound up taking a lot of work. A big chunk of the effort was getting together a ~4000 word story I was pleased with. I'm still much more comfortable writing scary and tense scenes than I am cute quiet romance; it's something I've been struggling with since writing the middle parts of Wayward. But I think I'm getting better at this kind of writing, and it's nice to have more tools in my toolbox. 

I'd like to be able to write something like this that's more stretched out, with a slower burn and bigger payoff. But I think this story benefits a lot from the 10-15 minute runtime and density of art/music/ideas. It definitely moves fast, but I think the payoff is small enough that it still feels decently earned.

I really appreciate Zeloz and Deb's help with the early test reading. The first "finished" draft actually ended a scene earlier, before the last time-skip. They correctly said it felt a little abrupt, and I quickly drafted a new ending I'm a lot happier with.

The web dev stuff took most of the rest of the work. It turns out doing web development from scratch in 2022 is... pretty tricky! You can't just auto-play MIDIs anymore, browsers block that. I had to do a lot of CSS and Javascript shenanigans just to mimic the style of old-school personal web pages, and a lot of extra work on top of that to keep it mobile-friendly. I'm pleased with the final effect though, and it was fun to feel like an actual programmer for the first time in ages.

I got almost all the Flickgame art together in the last several days of dev, and that part FELT the hardest even though it went really quick. Making actual art assets from scratch Does Not Come Easy to me. Working with a very limited toolset like Flickgame helped keep it manageable though. It's a skillset I want to develop more, because even though it was hard it was still pretty rewarding and delightful.

All told I think it took around thirty hours. It's the most love I've poured into a project this year outside of Breathless, which is very funny for such a silly premise. Friends seem to have enjoyed the story a lot, both the ones who have and have not seen the show, and I'm very pleased with how it turned out.

I'm realizing this year that a big part of what makes creative work exciting to me is the process of learning new skills, trying new things. Basically every part of this project was outside my normal wheelhouse. I constantly had to stretch muscles I wasn't used to stretching. But I scoped small enough that it didn't get too overwhelming. 

I don't think I'm the kind of dev that finds a niche and then iterates on it endlessly (although I think that can be a dope approach!) Instead I want to keep trying new things and get Pretty Good at a whole lot of creative skills. I'm feeling pretty jazzed about it!